Drug Strategy May Face Hard Road : War on cocaine: Bush will attend a summit in Colombia on Thursday. But months of preparation have produced only a communique that could have been signed last fall.

President Bush will travel to Colombia this week for a highly symbolic drug summit that is unlikely to have a quick impact on the flow of cocaine from South America, according to officials involved in pre-summit negotiations.

Months of preparations for the long-awaited meeting, intended to coordinate a multi-pronged attack on cocaine at its source, have produced only a 16-page communique that “could have been signed last fall,” one source said.

In the meantime, U.S. officials acknowledged, the Bush Administration has in many cases been unable to implement even the early stages of its Andean strategy, unveiled last September as the U.S. battle plan for the drug-producing region.

“It’s going to be a bumpy road,” one official said, referring to anti-drug prospects beyond the now-largely ceremonial meeting of Bush and three Andean presidents in Cartagena on Thursday. “The real benefit is going to be to get the leaders to sit down together.”

The summit will make way for launching a military-oriented campaign against traffickers, but U.S. officials said that upcoming presidential elections in Colombia and Peru will make it hard to carry out the effort. Meanwhile, the commitment of Bolivia to the cause remains uncertain.

“We’ve got two lame ducks and a wild card,” a U.S. official said. Colombian President Virgilio Barco Vargas and Peruvian leader Alan Garcia are to leave office this year, while prospects for stability in Bolivia under new President Jaime Paz Zamora are unclear.

The three Andean presidents and Bush will meet under extremely tight security. The cocaine cartels have been blamed for a number of political assassinations, and rumors of violent threats against the summit have been reported.

At pre-summit negotiations, the four nations were forced to concentrate on conclusions that they share, even though there were significant disagreements about details of their proposed separate anti-drug offensives.

The result of the talks, to be endorsed during the six-hour meeting in Cartagena, is a statement of principles so uncontroversial that it could have won approval as early as November, according to U.S. officials and representatives of the concerned Andean nations.

The officials said such an agreement, reached earlier, would have opened the way for quicker implementation of the Andean strategy. Its funding was approved by Congress before Thanksgiving. But because the summit meeting was set instead for February, negotiators have been slower to resolve a number of central issues, including how more than $60 million in new U.S. military assistance to Peru and Bolivia will be used.

While negotiators said they are confident that the presidential signing of the Document of Cartagena on Thursday would give a “spur” to the Andean offensives, they said it is unlikely that the United States can look forward to rapid progress.

“We’re sort of betwixt and between,” one official said. “This is just a case of bad timing.” He noted that the election campaigns in Peru and Colombia are soon likely to dominate the attention of political leaders and security forces despite whatever agreements might be reached with the United States.

The so-called Andean strategy calls for the United States to provide more than $2.2 billion in military and economic aid over five years to Peru, Bolivia and Colombia, which together produce nearly all of the world’s supply of illicit cocaine.

The plan represents a marked turnabout in U.S. policy, which previously provided scant assistance to the three Andean nations.

As a result, forging a new relationship in Peru and Bolivia in particular has been “slow going,” one official said.

In contrast, the military in Colombia, which has a longer-standing relationship with the United States, has already launched some of the programs outlined in the Andean strategy. Colombia received more than $60 million in emergency U.S. assistance last August after Barco declared an “all-out war” against drug traffickers.

The three-part summit document, approved by negotiators over the weekend, emphasizes for the first time the common determination of the four nations to curb cocaine trafficking. It outlines in general terms some of the steps that the nations intend to take, including U.S. pledges to crack down on money laundering and the shipment of chemicals necessary for the production of cocaine.

It also reiterates the U.S. commitment to provide new aid to the region and to seek additional contributions from other nations. But in what one South American diplomat said was an acknowledgement of the lack of specifics to be discussed at the meeting, it also calls for a follow-up drug summit later this year.

Times staff writer Art Pine contributed to this story.